From where I sit, the relative cost of kids goes up. In major cities:
- Kids are expected to have their own bedrooms
- The cost of a 3-bedroom apartment is beyond the means of most families of child-bearing age
- For most people, life is debt-driven. Mortgage. Credit card. College. Etc.
- Work is out-of-the-house, so kids need child care, which is a major expense. With schools, kids still need child care after school. This is different from kids hanging out on a farm.
I'd like a big family, but I can't afford a big family. Ironically, my (poor) ancestors could.
A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well. Homes are /expensive/ to build in the US.
> A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well.
The general trend of richer countries having fewer babies holds even in countries with wildly different zoning laws and expectations around living conditions. Japan’s fertility rate fell below replacement a long time ago, and even countries like India and Mexico are now at or below replacement levels.
For any given material explanation one can point to, there are clear counterexamples of countries without that material problem which still has a low fertility rate.
- The cost-of-living in India in Bangalore or Mumbai -- at a standard to afford a family -- is astronomical for relatively educated individuals making $10k/year. That's where affluent people live. It's not until you get into the real elites making $100k/year that it's easy again. That's the same worldwide. Even very poor countries have areas where these dynamics kick in.
- Where many poor people live, for example, on rural farms, it's possible to have lots of kids.
"Generous maternal benefits" don't come anywhere close to filling this gap.
You would expect some effect though, yet Northern Europe and Japan continue to have extremely low birth rates despite the efforts of their governments.
Also, many European countries saw fertility rates drop a long time ago, often back when housing was much, much cheaper. IIRC countries like Sweden and Norway dropped below replacement levels in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In countries I've been in, that period coincided with a move from farms, where land was ample, to cities, which were cramped. Big family housing wasn't really available; those cities had apartments which simply didn't really support larger families. Cost wasn't so much an issue for having a cramped 2 or 3 bedroom in the sixties, but beyond that, you moved into ultra-wealthy territory.
So I guess my question is whether you could write a little bit more about the Scandinavian countries. That's my own ignorance speaking.
Japanese cities are super-cramped. I would not want a big family in Tokyo.
Those adjustment factors would be things like -- what percentage of women have children, how many children do they have, how many children does the average nanny care for...
We could work through the various supply and demand factors, but, basically, whether compensated formally or not, if you hold the fertility rate fixed, then you also hold the amount-of-childcare fixed. There's some kind of conservation rule at work.
You can make the model a little bigger by including all the raising-of-children in those countries that are net exporters of people. Which there will be fewer and fewer of.
It's still doable but you have to sacrifice your standards of living, a tough trade-off to make.
In industrialization, we are talking about 4 years old spending whole day alone in the streets, while BOTH parents work 12 hours a day in factory. We are talking about kids that are small, because they dont eat enough. We are talking about 11 years old working in factories or selling newspapers for 10 hours a day, falling asleep on stairs due to being tired and expected to earn money for themselves and younger siblings.
Israel is also booming economically as it is the 24th in terms of GDP per capita now and rising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... Israel has the 2nd largest per capita VC investment in the world: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/countries-most-startup-inve...
What are they doing that others are not?
The US has a similar fertility-focused religious movement, but it's much more fringe and relatively smaller. Religious beliefs can drive super-high birth rates in pretty much any society, but aside from Israel, higher education has been associated with lower rates of religious belief. Declining religious participation and intensity of belief may well be contributing to the fall in global birth-rates.
1) immigration - of course Israel grants the right of every Jewish person to live in Israel, in fact paid an incentive to relocate. Presumably there a constant inflow from the Jewish diaspora and their descendants which might supplement the population
2) orthodox families, I'm guessing, have outsized families. Where women do not participate in the market economy, they end up having lots of kids instead
Again, no idea on the percentage contributions of either of these cases, but it might go some way toward explaining Israel's countervailing trend!
It's not just women. Somewhere around half of Haredi men do not work.
Or, stated less pejoratively, somewhere around half of Haredi men devote their lives to scholarship.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-population-growing-twic...
They were in education jobs until Covid, and now they’re in commerce jobs, but they’re obviously not productive members of society because of their religion?!?
As shocking as it might sound, yes.
It’s laughable to claim that people producing literal other people aren’t being productive.
TFR amongst secular Jewish women in Israel is 2.5. That's comfortably above the replacement level.
A woman who has a child is infinitely more productive than you are giving her credit for.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/in-georgia-a-religiously-inspired...
But obviously no one can pay that so either it's insurance or it goes to collections. In my case it's insurance. Only I've got a high deductible plan. 5k deductible. And because pregnancies go 9 months there's a chance that any given pregnancy costs 10k.
Meanwhile I asked my mom how much her pregnancies cost (all three c sections). Apparently insurance basically picked up all costs such that only trivial amounts were left over.
We've been extremely lucky to have ways to afford our children's births so far. Nothing we planned for just things that happened that saved us a ton of money. I honestly am not sure how most people handle this financially.
But is it something that needs to be "fixed"?
At this point, its pretty clear that naturally starting and carrying a developing fetus is not an issue. Its the cost of the child after its born that's the issue. Having a bunch of babies coming out of artificial wombs is a recipe for disaster if they have no parents.
Have you learned nothing from the single parent household pandemic? Single parent children have much worse life outcomes than dual parent households. Zero parents? I'd imagine that would be worse.
1) Artificial wombs ≠ no parents. Kids might just be handed over to folks who want to parent but don't want the pregnancy / birth.
2) Kids could be raised by the state. Has been done before, though generally as a form of military service, thinking specifically of the Ottoman devshirme system; granted they did abduction, but are a decent example of state managed child rearing
3) Maybe robots could do the parenting. Eventually they may be able to make a passable attempt at it. Reminded of the movie 'Mother' - a dystopia obviously but still...better than no be at all!
Find a way to make the cost to parents zero over the lifetime of the kid for all the basics (child care, healthcare, food, clothing) and I bet rates shoot way up.
Having a kid is an extremely expensive luxury good right now. No wonder people are hesitant to do it.
though having a kid being a luxury good is likely a persistent condition regardless of how strong the welfare state is, unless you actually go to the point of paying women to have more children (something we should try btw). Right now the incentives are weak - cash bonus in some countries, some form of income support in others - all pretty small beer, not enough to make a difference!
These lead to people postponing kids for years, so they all have them at the same time after. People in general don't want to have babies in high risk high danger situations.
It also creates friction politically, as the burden on the working populace increases due to a shift in working/non-working and almost no one wants to change for the worse. See the young vs the elderly and retirement ages, where the elderly will often vote for the young to carry the burden, and vice versa.
Long story short, it creates a situation where things have to change fundamentally or someone has to bite through the sour apple. Governments don't want to do either of these things.
What, really, is humanity doing? What is the point? The idea that our existence itself is ultimately grounded in economic growth feels pretty thin; I imagine it is to even the staunchest capitalists on any reflection.
There to me, is something ultimately embarrassing about this "problem". Its kinda like we invested a lot of time and resources to throw a party, and when only a few people show up, we start to diagnose what's wrong with those people that didn't come, and never once consider that it was a shitty party.
You make it sound like this progression is inevitable like every slow decline is followed by a steep fall and then finally exponential bust which seems not very convincing.
The elimination of poverty requires universal provision of education, women get educated, have less (no kids), birth rate drops and keeps dropping below the threshold of population stability.
I don't think there is any example of a society that has managed to reverse this trend. Maybe Ceaucescu Romania which at one point banned contraception and abortion, leading of course to the orphan crisis of the 1980's. Counter intuitively, devastating wars / famine also lead to post-crisis population boom, perhaps because education / career are entirely disrupted.
We probably need to think seriously about making people outside of the natural womb, can't see another way to reverse this trend outside of the above mentioned measures / circumstances